Monday, September 23, 2013

Congratulations to all the teams that took part in the ethics bowl. A team from Cherry Hill High School East won the competition and will represent our region in the national competition in April 2014. It's great that Villanova's Ethics Program, led by Dr. Mark Doorley, again organized the event and that so many volunteer judges and moderators made themselves available.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Also, the second Philadelphia area High School Ethics Bowl will be held on December 7th, again hosted by Villanova University. Contact me if you would like information on volunteering to help with the event (I was a judge last year and it was a great experience).

Carlin Romano’s book, America the Philosophical, argues that philosophy, has a deep and wide role to play in American intellectual life and culture. The degree to which it fulfills this role today, or should do so in the future, is a question which fits naturally into our long-running Public Issues Forum series. A great panel of speakers will join us, and we hope you will participate as well. (Here is an essay by Carlin summarizing his thesis:http://chronicle.com/article/Is-America-Philosophical-/131884/ )

Russellian Monism is
an attractive approach to the mind/body problem. It promises to put both mental
and physical phenomena on a common ontological ground. By providing a place in
nature for the qualitative properties featured in conscious experience, it disarms
prominent conceivability arguments against materialism. Russell’s approach can
be strengthened by employing elements of a more contemporary metaphysical
framework. There is a particularly good
fit with an account of the nature of properties set out by C.B. Martin and John
Heil. Labeled the identity theory of properties, this view posits that properties
are at once dispositional and qualitative.

This paper is
organized as follows. In section one I offer an overview of Russell’s theory. In
section two I briefly show how a key insight from Russell’s work has figured in
contemporary debates in philosophy of mind. Section three takes a closer look
at Russell’s metaphysics; this prepares the way for seeing how his theory might
be modified in light of more recent work. Section four introduces the idea that
the metaphysics of dispositional and categorical properties can play a role in
a Russell-style account. Section five outlines the identity theory of
properties and argues that its features can strengthen Russellian monism. In
section six I consider objections to the modified theory, and discuss where it
needs to be supplemented in order to more fully address the challenges of
explaining mind.